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On directing > The glance | Victor Erice

“There is already fiction in the glance”"Everyone has the capacity to create and recreate within them. And a film doesn’t exist unless it is seen—if there are no eyes to look at the images, the images don’t exist. When I’ve finished a film, it’s no longer mine—it belongs to the people. I’m nothing more than an intermediary in the process.""I don’t feel that I chose films; they chose me. I don’t mean to sound pretentious. During my childhood, films had a fundamental importance. In a country which, in the 1940s especially, was still very isolated from the rest of the world and marked by the Civil War, films offered me an extraordinary possibility to be a citizen of the world.""You don’t choose to be a film director when you’re little; you’d be a little monster! Also, do remember that nobody chooses the object of their love.""The music that I like best is the sound produced by the editing of all the images. The rhythm of the images has a music of its own and that’s much more difficult than just placing music on top of a film.""I feel that the language of painting belongs to the dawn of our time and civilisation, and, in a similar way, cinema belongs to its sunset. On the whole, cinema has a youthful image, but in fact I think it’s exactly the opposite.""Over the past year( 2009), I've been making short films, like a painter, I like it a lot. It's a series of documentaries I named Memory and Dream. I've filmed three chapters, I'm hoping to reach ten to screen them. These are short pieces that I shoot around the world, when I am travelling.""I strongly believe in what Roberto Rossellini said: the poorer you are, the greater your freedom. Being free is a question of being bare. You have to give things up."

"Victor Erice creates his film as a canvas, conjuring painterly images of slow dissolves and shafts of light that match Caravaggio in their power to animate a scene of stillness, or freeze one of mad movement"